BARCELONA—While MasterCard and Visa's shopping catalog's worth of new payment-connected wearables and Internet of Things (IoT) devices overpowered the mobile payments conversation at Mobile World Congress (MWC), there was plenty of innovation to show off at the show on the in-app commerce side as well. Keynotes and sessions strewn throughout the conference schedule featured companies such as Button, PayPal, and Stripe discussing the business opportunities in delivering contextually relevant online buying experiences for users within whatever apps they spend their time.

The expanding mobile payments ecosystem straddles both the in-store and online commerce experiences. On the online side, it's the apps themselves serving as that Internet of Payments, be it with natively embedded buy buttons within a social app, a deep-linked pathway for shopping across apps, or smarter mobile payment applications themselves. Aunkur Arya, General Manager of Mobile at Braintree (PayPal's payment processing arm), participated in MWC's panel on contextual commerce.

He later sat down with PCMag to talk about how PayPal is changing the way it approaches digital payments to suit the mobile app economy and enable transactions where and how consumers want to buy.

"The problem we're trying to solve is, there's a fundamental shift happening in how e-commerce is being conducted," said Arya. "Because you have so much engagement in social messaging platforms, the messaging players are trying to become the OS [operating system] now. The experience is starting to shift from the search model to buying something wherever you are on mobile."

MasterCard and Visa are using their position in the commerce chain to create platforms and standards by which retailers can easily support a wide range of IoT transactions. PayPal is taking on that same role for online merchants. The company launched a beta earlier this month of PayPal Commerce, a new platform based on PayPal's acquisition of buy button start-up Modest last year, to give merchants the ability to embed Buy buttons across third-party apps.

Not unlike how Stripe Relay is using application programming interfaces (APIs) to aggregate supply, and help online retailers build plug-and-play integrations across multiple apps, PayPal Commerce is a set of APIs and development tools. The platform gives retailers and merchants a way to sell on mobile apps and other digital channels, beyond their website or native app, using embeddable Buy buttons.

Stripe Relay is still far ahead in terms of merchant adoption at the moment, with hundreds of retail partners signed up since its launch last September. But PayPal and particularly Braintree have made significant headway on the app side. Arya gave the example of Pinterest's Buyable Pins launched last year, a new feature Braintree is helping to power

"The next chapter in this story is figuring out how you enable merchants to sell on these channels they're not familiar with," said Arya. "The holy grail for Pinterest is how they become more tied to actual purchase behavior since they're already driving a ton of e-commerce traffic to retailer websites. What they did with Buyable Pins is actually bring the buying experience inside the Pinterest UI [user interface]. If you pin a pair of Air Jordans, instead of being redirected and adding a couple clicks, Pinterest ups the conversion rate for merchants and helps facilitate the transaction itself."

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PayPal/Braintree also own popuar payments app Venmo and have contextual commerce partnerships with Uber in addition to Pinterest, most recently launching a partnership with Facebook Messenger and Uber for users to be able to hail an Uber ridefrom within the Facebook experience. Braintree also processes payments for apps including Airbnb. The company is now extending the Internet of Payments to the mobile operator level as well, announcing a partnership with Vodafone during MWC this week to help power the Vodafone Wallet on Android devices for in-store purchases.

At the core, it's all about the user experience (UX). Regardless of whether the user is buying at the app level or at the device level, PayPal sees its OneTouch product as the ideal focal point through which mobile transactions should flow. This lets users check out without entering a username, password, or billing details. Arya said PayPal wants to be an agnostic platform that can partner with all different segments of the ecosystem and enable that simple payment experience in all contexts.

"Uber and Airbnb shouldn't have to think about which wallets to support; their developers want to do simple integrations without going deep into the payments stack," said Arya. "On a platform level, there's iOS and Android and there's AWS for cloud infrastructure, but there's nothing for payments that's as simple. We're building the OS for payments."

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